Author: ccllabs

Professor Marco J. Castaldi, Director of the Earth Engineering Center of CCNY, who has been associated with WTERT since its foundation in 2002, is the head of WTERT-U.S.A. The leadership transition occurred during the EEC/WTERT 2018 bi-Annual Conference held at CCNY on October 4th & 5th, 2018. Professor Castaldi will continue to research novel and traditional thermal conversion systems that convert MSW into energy and chemicals. For more information regarding some of the activities of WTERT-USA please see the CCNY-EEC website.

Professor Castaldi is interviewed for a financial news segment regarding the increasing problem of plastic wastes. In the segment, Prof. Castaldi answers some questions about the suitability of using Waste-to-Energy and other thermal processes (i.e. gasification and pyrolysis) as a part of the solution to the plastic waste problem. For more please see the following-

Marco Castaldi of the City College of New York joined us on @BNNBloomberg’s Commodities

Plastics have gained significant attention recently due to a number of domestic and international activities. This brings awareness to an issue that we have long been investigating but theoretically and practically with organizations ranging from the US EPA and start-up companies. A new story has been published in Chemical & Engineering News from the American Chemical Society exploring the use of plastic waste for energy generation where Professor Castaldi has been interviewed and quoted. To read the entire story please the following link:

CCL alumni Alexsandra Guerra started a company called Nori in Seattle as a marketplace for reversing climate change. The company hosts summits, publishes weekly blogs, hosts webinars to engage experts into the design process, and hosts a weekly podcast on all things carbon removal. All of this can be found at https://nori.com.

Nori recently launched a crowd sale of tokens for early investors. The campaign can be seen here: republic.co/Nori

Visiting researcher Axel Fache will be working in CCL studying development of a catalytic methanation reactor for power-to-gas applications. Axel works in Laboratoire de thermique, énergétique et procédés (LaTEP), Pau, France. The aim of his project is to develop a catalytic reactor converting CO/CO2 (from waste and biomass valorization processes) and H2 (from renewable electricity origin) into synthetic methane. In CCL, Axel will be working for 2 months to perform experiments, and to compare some simulation results to experimental results of dynamic methanation.

CCL alumni Samhita Kattekola will begin working at Agilent Technologies as Field Service Engineer in Wilmington, DE. Samhita completed her bachelors from the City College of New York followed by Masters in chemical engineering at University of Delaware. Samhita spent her time at CCL as Macaulay Honors Research assistant. Her work involved fundamental research into carbon sequestration using gas hydrate based capture technologies. Samhita’s experience with CCL will allow her to rapidly adapt to her new role which requires troubleshooting skills with knowledge and understanding of physical principles in chemical engineering, involving the use of sophisticated equipment. Congratulations and good luck, Samhita!